Beddings
by CarmineDuvale
Summary: They sleep good, she writes. Short chapters. Gin'n'Tonic
1. Chapter 1

On the eve of her fifteenth birthday, expensive silk sheets spill from a cardboard box onto Ginny's dorm-room bed and the sight, the simple picture something so unusual paints, has her stumbling backwards, pupils delatated, flight instincts overwhelming any rational thoughts.

On the eve of her fifteenth birthday, Ginny Weasley's wrists get torn apart badly and then magically sewn together and when Harry asks about the scars, concern in his green eyes, she shrugs and says _Venomous Tentacles_ like it's nothing and she's fine.

It's not.

And she isn't.

But he believes her readily enough.

The sheets end up ripped and cut and into the wicker basket in one of the many bathrooms for the elves to take them away, away to Merlin knows where, someplace their physical presence can't come back from to hunt her. The idea that they exist though, that idea makes her twist and turn and bite into her own skin until its surface breaks and blood drags down her fingers, pooling in her palm, staining the ever uncovered mattress she lies on.

Those wounds, like her mind, never get to heal.

Ginny doesn't have any sort of beddings and, as far as her roommates are concerned, the reasons are unfathomable.

Maybe she's just weird.

Maybe she's just poor.

It's not like she ever tells anybody that the floor of the Chamber felt like rough sheets under her cheek.

It's not like she ever tells them Tom ruined her with his mind, either.

 _I heard Malfoy brings silk sheets from home,_ she remembers writing while laying on the ratty fabrics all her brothers had used. Back then, they were comfort. And _You won't even find silk in our home._ Back then, she didn't know how anything outside of the wool of her sweaters and the cotton of her dresses and the velvet of the drapes felt.

 _I never had expensive stuff either._ And _If I were there, Ginevra, I'd buy you all the silk sheets in the world._

He wasn't there, of course, but one day, after one of her lapses, after heaving into a toilet feeling like she had lost her mind, after scrubbing what she hoped to the gods was red paint off her hands, after plucking fine little feathers out of her hair, she came back to find pearl grey satin shimmering on her bed.

She never asked.

He never told.

And when everything ended she burned the sheets, hers, Tom's, Malfoy's, and went on with her life like she had never trusted things that hadn't shown where their brain was being kept.

On the eve of her fifteenth birthday, Ginny Weasley obsesses, burned, stabbed diary clenched between her hands, feeling the link lingering, strengthening, tugging at that piece of her soul she's careful never to tell about, never to think too much at.

On the eve of her first day at fifteen, she opens it.

 _How do your silk sheets sleep?_ he asks her, perfect writing looped around the fang.

From where she sits on the barely patched together, barely-resembling-sheets sheets, Ginny contemplates.

 _They sleep good,_ she writes back.

* * *

 ** _Gin'n'tonic. I crossed this line. I love it. Might even finish the Tomione, now._**

 ** _I bow to Colubrina, whose work made the obsession blossom._**


	2. He knows he's bad

Tom wonders when this alter ego of his bowed down to the concept of fate for the first time. Wonders, honestly, when his lovely mind, his rational, if insensitive and damaging, thinking slipped down the sloppy path of uncaring, unfaltering insanity.

When power became an abstract notion, a faraway set goal, a point to be reached, rather than a reality.

Wonders what fate shall do with his predicament.

And wonders on.

It's a dangerous world, really, one where this Tom Riddle is alive and sane enough to think, but one where he contemptuously contemplates the actions of Lord Voldemort might just as well tilt on its axis low enough to fall.

Might as well burn.

Might as well freeze.

Might as well strip of humans and their creances, as it's already halfway dead.

He sleeps in the Riddle House these days, with its damp rooms and icy beds, in what he knows to have been his filthy father's room and bed, and obsesses, obsesses while lying on silk sheets not quite well cleaned up, not quite well dusted, not quite warm.

He tortures himself and relishes in it.

And everything is reduced to a futile question of what could have been.

Silk sheets bring her to mind, of course, the girl he almost drained of her own self, but, caught in the middle of deciding the mathematical probability of following the same path as what he thinks of as _the original_ , he doesn't let himself be reminded of her too often.

Some nights, though, he just can't help it. Some night, he doesn't even try.

She was tedious, for a fact. So much repressed feelings, such fear, _**such resentment**_.

Such desire for greatness.

Such presence of mind, he sometimes muses. And such unblinking loyalty.

It amuses him, how sure he is that she had known before the end. How sure he is that she had figured it all out somewhere in the middle.

How she stood by the figurative bad wolf cocooned in her red tresses.

It annoys him also, grating on his nerves, the selfless protection of the stupid little girl, the lies she told (it's common sense she lied), the tales she spun, _he was so charming, mamma,_ and _I really thought he cared._

It feels like a stab to his pride, the way the kid molded her soul to his and willingly gave.

The way he felt compelled to give her back.

The sheets. Some nights, he rips them off the bed and lies on mattresses and lets his blood boil, boil with the knowledge she exists.

That she _**knows**_ , on a deep, cellular lever, the intricacies of the cavern he calls soul.

On the eve of the day before of what he knows to be Ginevra's fifteenth birthday, money spill - like blood out of veins - from the pocket of the Muggle man that's dead at his feet and, with a lazy flick, he accios them into his hand.

 _You won't even find silk in our home,_ he remembers.

…

 _The real me…_ he starts. Then _Do you think I'm yet insane?_ he wills the hollow support of the diary to show.

 _Didn't think you cared,_ she says. Then _Aren't we all?_

But he is not quite human, is he now? Just a piece of soul a foolish man let loose from its confine.

* * *

 ** _You people are lovely._**

 ** _I had a lovely day, than a fight, then felt like some Tom Riddle couldn't hurt. This madness might go on, I dare to say_**


	3. Chapter 3

Ginny watches Ron's sullen face with a sour expression of her own, the familiar feeling of contempt mixed with indulgent love washing over her. Annoyance, though, is not far behind.

"I just wish we could go home already," he mutters for what must be – it is – the fifty-seventh time in a row, shoveling another spoonful into his mouth without stopping to properly swallow. "I see enough of this place through the year," he adds mournfully, almost unintelligibly, speaking around what she swears is half a piece of bread. "Now I cannot leave it ever again?"

Spit mixed with scrambled eggs land on Ginny's face and she wipes it off with a napkin, barely keeping in a shiver of disgust. Why Ron has worse table manners than any of her other brothers she's never been able to figure out.

"We've been over this before, Ron," Hermione sighs from the spot next to him, her patience seemingly infinite these days. "It's not probable You-Know-Who'll attack Hogwarts now. We're safer here until Dumbledore comes back."

Silence reigns for a moment as they all mentally go over what no one is really saying, how the Gringotts attack and the Ministry coup and the Prophet takeover keep them on their toes, ready to tip over. How they give them new things, new things no one really needs, to push them over the metaphorical edge of their own nightmares.

They're not alone in this, of course.

Ginny can feel it in the strained silence of the adults, see it in the crazed smiles that spread across their faces like melted latex, like they are pulling muscles in this quest for obviously made up happiness. It's been like this for a year and yet, it's hitting especially hard now, that Dumbledore's not back from his super secret, super special, I-must-do-it-by-myself mission.

It's weird.

Not that Dumbledore's not notorious for disappearing when most needed or for pushing kids into bigger-than-life plans, but the two full weeks of panicked quietness and chirpy baby talk from her mother lead her to believe something other than his usual stroll down uselessness lane might actually be happening.

She can easily tell Hermione is worried. That she has reached the same understanding of the situation.

Ron, however, obviously hasn't.

"But it's summer," he whines. "Why do we have to be stuck at _school_ in summer?"

In front of this blatant, hard-headed stupidity, Ginny can't help but clench her teeth viciously. What is wrong with this idiot and why does no one beat sense into him? Why can't he just grasp the basic conduit of tense social situations? Why can he never be useful instead of a bottomless pit of hunger and complaint?

 _ **Because it's safe**_ , she wants to fire at him, wants to bleed into him through every pour. She can't, not when it really isn't, not when the diary burns a hole into the pocket of her cloak.

Not when she hasn't felt safety in this castle in forever, not even in the warmth of her own bedding.

She wants to lie. She wants it bad.

"Because it's safer," Hermione says and Ginny cannot help but observe what a refined observation that is, what a strenuous quality it puts in Hermione's otherwise unfaltering voice.

She analyzes the other girl sharply, but the moment has passed and, but for the almost imperceptible lines at the corners of her lips, there is no sign that it's truly ever fleeted by.

A rain of food and spit descends upon her once again, making the ugly head of something unnamed rear in her chest.

" _Disgust mixed with love is still disgust, Ginevra. And contempt mixed with fondness is the worst kind."_

It's her voice, but they're not ( **they're not)** her thoughts and her finger clench around the crinkled, burned, dirty pages, basilisk fang long since removed.

Hermione's owlish gaze doesn't slide off Ginny for a moment.

 _He's my_ _ **brother.**_

 _They're not my feelings, love,_ he whispers back.

* * *

 ** _I have no self-control. Here, have some context_**


	4. Chapter 4

It's disgustingly mundane almost, how his half-life carries on these days, so much that there are times when Tom thinks the regression to an unburdened mind might manage to be madness in itself.

It's ironically hilarious, this part of Lord Voldemort going out to buy bread and to get books and to watch Muggle kids chasing each other down grassy roads that lead to the old Gaunt shack, all the while trembling inside on the edge of restless deprecation. Disconcerting, really, how easily it is, to hide in the old manor, dust settling around, mind wandering strange paths, this quarter of soul inhabiting a fickle travesty of a body feeling the constant pull of all its pieces, scattered and flimsy and trapped around the world.

It's dangerous, the idea that he could fall into such a routine, into a thinker's life with an obsessive, all-consuming question to resolve.

 _(When did you burn and then extinguish to this unnoticed hand of heated dust, Marvolo Riddle? When?)_

He gets flashes to _the original_ 's mind sometimes and it makes him shudder with unbridled horror, the taste of death those experiences leave behind in their wake. The bittersweet smell of putrefaction they fill his nostrils with. And though the power flowing through him then it's so pregnant it seems to radiate out of every pore, it's off, tormented, twisted, as if magic is fighting against itself, trying to escape.

It doesn't go unnoticed, how that body risen out of a cauldron, how that body created out of sheer will and charms and borrowed, unfiltered hate despises the soul inhibiting its premise.

How this being, this Lord Voldemort, this powerful creature of no death, no sleep, no shortage of magical calibre, it's not what he had set out to become.

How this creature fearful of prophecies and kids stopped understanding magic the way Tom Riddle did and turned into a vacuum of madness and obsession.

 _(When did you discard the "living" part, Marvolo Riddle? When did you decide the only part you needed was "eternal"?)_

It's not that Tom is always so pretentious in his mind.

Sometimes he has simple worries, like being real, and whole, and becoming himself again. He wants a body with blood in its veins and all those pieces of soul put back into one place.

He wants Voldemort dead and left behind in dust, and wants to battle on his own and desires to conquer death another way, with a sane mind that's not inhabiting a man-made corpse sustained by Muggle bones and ratty servants' flesh.

He wants life, this Tom Riddle. He wants to understand where he went wrong.

He wants this person who could show him, Ginevra Weasley as his, the first lieutenant in a new cavalry he'll make.

He wants her there.

He wants her willing.

…

He infuses the diary with pieces of his mind late at night, while laying on silk sheets.

Convenient, really, how Horcruxes always linger, how soul never truly leaves, how basilisk venom only destroys so much.

 _I don't know why I can heal myself of you,_ she writes him.

 _You like being sick, Ginevra. There's realness in it._

* * *

 ** _Trying to understand Tom Riddle is so fascinating. So are your sweet comments *hearts*_**


	5. Chapter 5

Draco Malfoy arrives at Hogwarts on one of those crisp mornings that make you feel like the world is going to combust and his arrival floods Ginny with a sort of crazy giddiness so akin to smugness her stomach clenches painfully.

 _Is that Abraxas's nephew?_ Tom whispers in her mind, venomous curiosity peaked. _Doesn't look like he slept on those silk sheets of his lately, does he?_

He really doesn't.

His usual albino paleness is replaced by a grayness so uniform he seems sketched with smeared charcoal and soot and his clothing, always black, always neatly pressed, is rumpled and soiled with blood and filth. Malfoy doesn't look aristocratic anymore, but like something the cat might have dragged in if the cat in cause had been desperately hungry.

The face is the worst, a study in blues and violets, in sickly yellows and dirty-blood reds. Quite frankly, he appears ready to keel over and die while Narcissa Malfoy is barely supporting his weight, the fingers holding her wand so white and bony she is surprised the piece of wood doesn't snap in half. Magic, she supposes.

Ginny lingers on the outskirts of the group, gaze fixed firmly on the sorry pair, face carefully hidden behind the curtain of red hair. Her lips almost twitch multiple times as, despite the horrible show, no one rushes to help them.

 _You like this,_ Tom cackles, delighted. _You can't help but_ _ **love**_ _how the mighty has fallen._

Ginny doesn't deny it, how, looking at him like that, it's not compassion that comes to mind, but every insult he had ever hurled at her, every time he had made her feel little and poor and unworthy. Every time she had lied on her empty mattress, staring at the canopy, wishing wishes she still can't voice out loud.

 _I can just guess what you wanted,_ Tom purrs tauntingly. _Money?_ _Social standing? A life as a sanctimonious pureblood princess, a lovely prize to win, with a filthy rich daddy and rich suitors by the ton?_ He almost hisses that last part, contemptuous pleasure dripping from his tone.

She does her best to ignore him.

 _I'm right, aren't I?_ _Isn't that what you want, Ginevra?_

She shakes her head as if to scare away unwanted flies; as if to shake her thoughts out in the world. To let them fly on the summer breeze.

 _I'll give it to you if you truly do,_ Tom hums.

Her thumb finds its way to her mouth and she bites it so hard the thin skin cracks and blood spills on her tongue.

 _But I could give you so much more._

He's almost seductive in his relentless pursuit.

 _Your own power. Your own glory. Everyone at your feet, groveling for the past. Isn't_ _ **that**_ _what you truly want?_

She doesn't. She _**doesn't**_.

But she cannot tear her gaze away from Malfoy and she cannot quiet Tom down. She cannot stop the feeling in her chest either, the ugly head of the creature rearing again.

 _I love you vindictive,_ he chuckles lowly, maliciously. _I love you revengeful._

She gets the undertone of what he doesn't say.

 _Your soul is like mine._

And she's afraid he's right as she coats her lips with blood and licks them.

* * *

 ** _Seriously though, can you tell how hard I'm winging this?_**

 ** _Love your comments 3_**


	6. Chapter 6

_It's not exactly a rule set in stone, but there's this constant state of things where Albus Dumbledore knows. He knows something, and of something, and about something, and his knowledge dresses and undresses all these different nuances and he knows, knows deep, and relentless, and without offering reasons._

 _He just does._

 _Like the way the sky sometimes rains and sometimes softens and sometimes, if the day is particularly cold and crisp as an apple, it just exists, vast and grey and glorious and brisk. That's the way Albus Dumbledore knows things. Unapologetic and clinic and with the stains of past mistakes all over the wisp of smoke he passes as a soul._

 _So he knows, of course he knows, that playing with fire leaves wounds that never quite heal, that its embers seep into one's skin like flaming, disorganized cells and fester like cancer in one's body. That they crisp your edges and burn your middles and set your insides in a halo of blazing insanity._

 _He really does._

 _But he plays with it anyway, because there's this constant state of things where Albus Dumbledore knows, where he constantly wants, where he viscerally needs to know more._

 _This state destroys him._

 _This state and three turnings._

 _The Arianna that fills the Gaunt Shack with her almost translucent, terrible presence, the Arianna that lifts eyes as blue as the waters of hell might be, the Arianna that pins him in place with that accusing, both maddened and maddening stare, that Arianna –_ _ **the**_ _Arianna - is so achingly his sister that his knees wobble and his heart stutters and he cannot think._ _ **He cannot think.**_

 _You need to think to know things, you silly, silly man._

 _But he doesn't, oh, how he doesn't, and for the first time in decades he's not the Albus Dumbledore who knows, but the one who almost made the muggles grovel at his feet and the one who almost let his heart at the mercy of Gellert Grindelwald and the one who put the greater good on so high a pedestal he raised the kids he fought for as pigs to send to slaughter._

 _In these moments, he's the man he became, not the one the world sings as a hero, not the one he sees when he looks in Harry Potter's eyes, not the one he projects on his eyelids in all those lonely, lonely nights, and he feels this in his bones and he cracks and he sags._

 _And he's nothing._

 _So is there any wonder that when she seems to blossom at the sight of his tears and when she cruelly rejoices in the sound of his gasps and when she twirls on her tippy toes at every broken croak that wants to be her name, is there any surprise that he pours himself into her bit by bit by tiny bit? Is there any, really?_

 _And when he's as empty on the outside as he is on the inside, when she's almost solid, and whole, and devastating, when she doesn't seem mad anymore, but satisfied and vapid, is there any wonder that when he's almost dead and she almost alive, is the there any wonder the illusion cracks and Tom Riddle smirks and the ring drops and Albus Dumbledore drops with it? Is there any, really?_

" _Poor Professor Dumbledore," he hears and "Brought to his knees by love," and "Thank you, old man," and he's dead, he's dead, he's dead, and in the wake of his death he knows one thing, that Tom Riddle is not Voldemort yet and that he's terrible and terrible and sane._

 _And, oh, the desperation._

…

" _So,"_ Ginny writes, _"were you ever going to tell me about Dumbledore?"_

 _"About Dumbledore?"_ he purrs inside her mind. _"But what would have done a little girl like you with such a knowledge?"_

 _"Wanker,"_ she offers _. "You're terrible."_

 _"I'm_ _sane,"_ he drawls _. "I'm terrible and sane and almost, almost real."_ And _"You'll make me better, right, Ginevra?"_

" _Don't fool yourself,"_ she mockingly chids. _"I'll make you worse."_

That's what he likes to hear.

* * *

 ** _In which I explain how Tom is here and I wonder how bad exactly is this tiny chapter. Kisses to those of you commented. I heart you all._**


	7. Chapter 7

_The old Vanishing Cabinet,_ he idly brings it up one night. _Is it still on the first floor, by any chance?_

 _Nope,_ she answers, popping the p in that way she knows he dislikes and that she does purely to annoy him. _Can't say I've seen it since my brothers shoved Montague in and sent it crushing._ By the happy purr resounding through their connection, it's a memory she deeply enjoys and he relishes in the waves of her viciousness. _They must have stored the remains somewhere, though._ _Not the most appropriate thing to have in a school but it's not like they ever throw anything away in this place. Sometimes, even the cold toast from breakfast makes it to dinner._

Rambling aside, Tom knows storage means only one thing at Hogwarts. He hums, pleased, and rolls over on his other side. _How good have you become at Charms, Ginevra?_

She's quiet for a moment and the way she doesn't even question his intentions fills him with satisfaction. She's embracing her willingness, he thinks. She's becoming so good. She'll be such an useful girl. So malleable. So opportunistic.

 _Not good enough to repair that thing, if that's what you're getting at._

So humanly limited. He needs more minions. No. He went down that route one time and it ended in more psychosis than intended. He needs more _allies_ this time around.

…

One of the reasons he doesn't understand his alter-ego's look of choice, for all its noseless, cadaveric glory, is that things just generally go your way when you're young, handsome and drenched in honeyed charm.

Indeed, there are ideas that are just inconceivable when you're a red-eyed homicidal loon and strolling down the streets of Little Hangleton until you get to a hidden place safe enough to call the Knight Bus is definitely one of them. The chauffeur is old and cranky and his voice is broken like the dangling of a sad, rusty bell, but you smile politely, and excuse yourself for making him travel all the way to this desolated piece of Muggle land, and gush a little over the dingy car like you've never seen something alike in all your eternity, and compliment his appalling driving skills and magical caliber necessary to run a business like this one, and he'll eat from your palm like a chirping bird in no time, and tell you all about poor Stan who is now in Azkaban but couldn't possibly have been a Death Eater.

Tom begs to differ. Unskilled idiots with permanent access to whispered conversations between the low-income, second and third class citizens? Definitely his type of follower, but who is he to correct this upstanding example of useful foolishness?

Ernie drops him in front of the Leaky Cauldron and he goes in unobserved, just another magical boy, here to get his magical stuff for his magical school, and he even gets a simpering smile from the barmaid and a fond look for an old, jewelry-wearing woman and he fits this situation like he fits his skin because this is who he remembers being, a looker with enough skill and contempt for the world to wipe them all.

He glides down Diagon Alley and further, careful to look at the appropriate windows, careful to avoid Ollivander and his over-encompassing memory until, as if plucked from the belly of a beast, Borgin and Burkes appears before him, as dark and dreary as he remembers it.

An old man, whom he remembers as the once upon a time Young Master Borgin, the quiet associate, the absent partner, lifts his gaze at the sound of the door opening and, by the way his gaze fixes upon the impossibly young, impossibly present sixteen years old Tom Riddle, he's been undeniably recognized. Fear is clouding those dark, beady eyes.

"Good afternoon," Tom greets almost pleasantly. "You've received my letter, I hope? I'm here for the cabinet."

If the shaking is to be trusted, Borgin remembers everything and more. The letter. The cabinet. The way he had once treated Caracturus Burke's prodigy clerk. That last one hadn't been particularly pleasant and it's a pity, really, that Tom can't afford to spoil himself and kill him.

* * *

 _ **Thank you for all your lovely reviews 3 You are very dear to my heart. In other news, I have another story called Icarus Ascending that you might like to check out? It's not a gin'n'tonic but you might find yourself enjoying it anyway.**_


	8. Chapter 8

Ginevra goes home for Christmas, in part because her mother can –all the way from the Burrow – tap her foot in disappointed expectation and make it feel like she is tapping on Ginny's very brain, and partially because everyone else is going and – Tom says – it wouldn't be good to stand out now.

 _It's not like someone can guess I'm helping your resurrected sixteen years old self snatch the world from under the noseless domination of your evil counterpart,_ she says, more than halfway whinny. _Too many variables,_ he answers, and she doesn't really know what he is going on about but shrugs and listens all the same.

Mostly, she goes because the cabinet is driving her up the walls and there are just four of them even in the Room. She's tired of crawling up, up, up.

 _It's like the thing itself doesn't want to be fixed,_ Ginny tells him _. And your bloody diadem is making fun of me all the time, I swear to the gods._

Tom has no idea what diadem she is talking about but he thinks _Horcrux,_ and puts it on the long list of things he'll have to take much better care off this – very much un-hoped for – time around, and purrs. _Beggars can't be choosers, Ginny dear._

…

The twins have sharp smiles and sharper gazes, and Ginny could never understand why everyone thinks her brothers are such nice guys. They're not. They're extroverts and hands-on and charmers and, like most charming men out there, they're cruel.

They're also smart and cunning though she could, perhaps, prove on par with them on that particular point.

"Well, well." Fred always opens the conversations. It's as much a trick as any card play they try, as revised as every little show they put on for the others, as researched as everything else they ever do. She figured them out long ago – pranksters; entertainers; fakers - and by now she can dance their little walts just fine when in need

Fred isn't done. "George, old pal," he croons. "Me thinks our sister's acting pretty weird these days. What says you?"

"This confused duckling, Fred, my man? A little weirder than usual, I'd say."

A calculated smirk, the rictus of the predator circling the prey. "A little? Is that all?" George nods. "A tiny bit. A molecule. A smidgen. A –"

Ginny has spent a lot of time with Tom Riddle in her head but her patience is still short, her temper still a sizzling fire.

"What do you two idiots want?" she demands.

Fred's eyes narrow to slits. "There's something missing from our private stocks, Ginevra. And I doubt Ron would have been bright enough to know what that is. Or talented enough to get it, for that matter." George leans in over her shoulder, effectively caging Ginny between them. "Been wanting to play hopscotch lately, Dim Gin? You should have asked nicely, girlie, we would've played with you. You shouldn't steal, you know. Not nice."

Fred shakes his head in mocking remorse. "Not nice at all, GinGin. What would mummy say about itty bitty Ginny taking what's not hers, hmm? Don't you want to know, too, George? Shall I ask her?"

She hates them, the way they always try to make her feel small, the way they always seem more like playful Tasmanian devils than what they truly are. She hates _them. She hates them_. But she can play the game, too.

"Ask,"Ginny says sugary sweet. "I have questions, too, of course. I wonder what mummy would say about Little Georgie and Teddy Freddy having Peruvian chalk in their room hmm? Trying to draw pentagrams and stuff. Raising the dead in their spare time. Wait, wait, don't tell me. You wanted to talk to grandma, no? Grandpa? Great Uncle Billius, perhaps? Then it wouldn't be too bad if I told, would it? After all, there's no chance you'd use it to summon someone… darker, shall I say? Is there?"

She's gambling, really, but she knows their tells, the way Fred's pinky contorts or the way the tips of George's ears flush the tiniest bit and she knows she has them. Now, Ginny is the one smirking. _Got you._

…

 _That cabinet. It might not be a problem for long._ Tom hums, content. _Diadem Me would approve,_ he says, and he feels her both preening and bristling under his praise.

* * *

 _ **This fic fights me. FIGHTs ME.**_


	9. Chapter 9

_It occurred to me last night that I never gave much thought to your reasons for helping me,_ Tom tinkles in her mind one morning and for the first time, he sounds less assured, more chagrined, almost troubled. Consternated, she'd say if this were anyone but Tom Riddle.

He usually doesn't bother her during classes but if she's learned something about Ring-Tom as opposed to Diary-Tom, is that he's needier in a way. As if the most earnest part of his soul had craved and craved inside that stone for years, and it was now spilling outwards everything it had contained, and that everything was a flood, a tsunami, a tornado spinning at heightened, immeasurable speed.

For him to bother her during Transfiguration, and for _that of all things,_ must mean his neediness has reached new heights she is almost scared of exploring. Ginny would be amused but it's too early, and she slept too little, and there's way too much light, and her stupid mouse just won't do what it's supposed to do and turn into a teacup and just –

 _It occurs to me you know levels of self-absorption I can only dare to dream of,_ she thinks and flutters her wand more aggressively.

He sighs. As impressed as he usually is with her combat spells knowledge, he really has no patience for her frequent failures in Transfiguration. _You need to flick less and swish more. And jab the air there after the last vowel._

She does and the rodent melts away into such a dainty cup Ginny is almost afraid to touch it. _You're just hopeless,_ Tom dismisses her concerns. _It's not even that good,_ he says but it is, it's got an encrusted floral pattern, for everything that's holy, and Ginny thinks that little ringlet might be actual gold and –

 _You really went demented._ She'd whistle but she has no idea how to do that in her mind. _You really, truly went apoplectically insane, Tom. Look at this thing. You could have been fucking rich, and bought Elixir from Flamel, and hung your little Slytherin coat of arms on the walls of your mansion, and preached radical policies from inside the Wizengamot like every miserable swot in this country. But no. Sure you could not do that. Until this point, I admit I kind of thought your brilliance was genocide-oriented but..._

 _But I really could not have done that, Ginevra, h_ e almost purrs in her mind. _And you know my reasons._

She sniffs out loud – it's always tricky to keep her most physical reactions on purely a mental level – and McGonagall gives her a sharp look, all reproach. A second later, another mouse is deposited on her desk, and something about how a single flower spring does not make is being muttered, and shouldn't she practice some more, and Ginny sighs and lifts her wand again.

"It's a very pretty flower, though," McGonagall acquiesces and ten points for Gryffindor are given.

 _It's the sign of a gentle upbringing to say thank you,_ Tom says. _And you still did not answer my question._

 _A gentleman does not demand compensation, Your Highness. And maybe I'm just a special snowflake, too._

Tom snorts. Unlike her, he knows how to inhabit even the most reclusive corners of the mind.

 _Do you want to know what I think?_

 _You mean you aren't going to tell me anyway? Maybe you_ _ **are**_ _a gentleman, after all._

"Mouse, Miss Weasley," McGonagall reminds and Ginny flutters her wand half-heartedly. There's silence everywhere.

 _Tom? You truly are going to say nothing?_

 _I think I'll let you confirm my theories._ He goes quiet for a moment. _Also, now that the cabinet is fixed, I think you should send me the diadem._

Ginny's back stiffens and then forcefully relaxes as if something in her spine had just shattered.

 _Yes. Yes, I'll do that._

* * *

 _ **This is ending soon. It needs to.**_


End file.
